Demand of quality

PARTICIPANTS OF THE CONFERENCE “NEW MEDIA – NEW POSSIBILITIES OF 2014” ANALYZED THE CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN JOURNALISM, WITH SOME OF THE ANALYSIS USING THE DAY AS AN EXAMPLE / Photo courtesy of the Independent Association of Broadcasters

Euromaidan has had a strong effect on development of Ukrainian mass media. In this period the word “streamer” (a person who delivers content live over the Internet) is now used more often than “reporter” or “journalist.” The revolution made traditional, both central and regional, mass media, take a step towards the Internet, having launched online broadcasts of mass events and actions for their websites. For example, regional TV channel Donbass streamed from the action “Donbas is Ukraine.” A total of 97,000 people were watching simultaneously the blue-and-yellow meeting in Lenin Square in Donetsk, attended by 10,000 people. However, the media group does not stop on this. As a representative of the channel Ksenia Filatova stated at a conference, the team of the broadcaster is going to continue to practice these things on its website. “The administration does not have any complaints about the quality, and such content attracts more viewers,” Filatova noted. “Local events are the most interesting for the audience. No central mass media will show them quickly and within the context, like local media do.”

At the same time, Maidan and the revolution have increased the audience of the Internet media by many times. Maksym Savanevsky, the head of the Watcher project notes that on the whole the audience of news media has increased by 45 percent. He emphasizes that whereas in September 2013 the audience of news websites was 15 percent, in February 2014 it was already 60 percent. The unique daytime audience of a news website at that time was 2.5 million of viewers, and now this number has reached 8 million. Incidentally, the website of the newspaper Den is not an exception, as well as our pages on social media. So, the number of followers of our Twitter account has grown over the past few months fourfold, and the audience of the website – fivefold.

However, Savanevsky considers that as soon as the revolution events fade, and the situation in the country stabilizes, the interest to sociopolitical content will again drop to its natural 15 percent, which is, by the way, the same as in other countries of the world. Thus the task of website managers is to use unique content to keep the interest of the audience, which is today literally attacking news agencies in search of information.

The experts note that visual information became important during Euromaidan. Publications with increased frequency published maps, information graphics, tables, and integrated them into the text. However, it was not so often. Anatolii Bondarenko (teksty.org.ua) emphasizes that any news supplemented with a picture will be read much easier than a text with many figures. British and American mass media can boast real masterpieces. Bondarenko notes that lately the digital press has gotten a new direction, “snowfallization,” when texts become interactive.

Another trend, which emerged recently in Ukrainian mass media, is a demand of quality content. To get this, people are ready today to vote with their wallets. Proof of this is the example of Hromadske TV and Hromadske radio, which raised their first budgets with the help of Spilnokosht. Is this for long? Has Ukrainian society grown mature enough to pay for media services? Director of digital marketing of LG Russia Dennis Adamovich thinks that media should look for various platforms and select specific advertisers for them. He states that the more platforms there are, the more advertisers there will be with different approach to the product.

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